The Center for Biological
Diversity ("CBD") and 10 co-petitioners filed a formal administrative
petition today with the National
Marine Fisheries Service ("NMFS") to list the Southern Resident
killer whale as Endangered under the Federal Endangered Species Act ("ESA").
The petition documents the decline and likely extinction of the most well-studied
killer whale population in the world.

Population instability
has marked the Southern Residents since the late 1960s when dozens of
young killer whales were removed from the population for live display
in aquaria. Over the past five years the Southern Residents have declined
15.5%, leaving only 82 individuals in the population at the end of the
2000 survey year. This time the cause of the decline appears to be the
synergistic effects of high levels of toxic pollutants, a population decline
in their preferred salmon prey, and human disturbance. If the current
decline isn't arrested, the Southern Residents will be extinct within
200 years.

"The Southern
Resident population is so small and the threats it faces so systemic that
extinction is a vivid possibility," said Brent Plater, attorney for
CBD and lead author of the petition. "With this petition we are taking
a major step toward saving the Southern Residents from extinction."

The Pacific Northwest
is home to three sympatric killer whale forms: The meat-eating Transients,
the fish-eating Residents, and the recently discovered Offshores. The
Residents are organized into two populations: the Northern Residents and
the Southern Residents. Each sympatric population shows markedly different
physiological, morphological, and behavioral characteristics, and interactions
between the populations have not been documented. The differences between
the Residents and Transients are so great that some scientists have proposed
that they are in fact different species.

The Northern Residents are the most comparable population to the Southern
Residents. However, over the same time period that the Southern Residents
have show troubling population instability, the Northern Residents have
shown a steady increase in numbers. This finding indicates that the Southern
Residents are facing unique external threats that are impeding the population's
natural survival.

The Southern Residents
can be protected under the ESA because they are both "discrete"
and "significant" and therefore qualify as a distinct population
segment of the species. Distinct population segments are afforded all
the protections available under the ESA because they are important to
the existence of the species as a whole.

"The significance
of the Southern Residents to the species as a whole and to the people
of the Pacific Northwest has been extensively documented," said Plater.
"The question now is whether NMFS will act to protect the Southern
Residents while there is still time to help the population recover."

Whether NMFS will
respond to the petition as required by law was put into question when
the Bush administration announced it was attempting to eviscerate the
ESA by exempting the United States Fish and Wildlife Service-NMFS' sister
agency that is entrusted with protecting non-marine imperiled species-from
the mandated response timelines and the citizen-initiated enforcement
provisions in the ESA. Because NMFS has jurisdiction over imperiled marine
species, the Southern Resident petition is not directly affected by this
proposal. However, it indicates that the Bush Administration may be unresponsive
and attempt to evade the legal requirements of the ESA.

"The Bush administration
is attacking citizen participation because they know citizen participation
works," said Kieran Suckling, executive director of CBD. "Without
actions like we are taking today, hundreds of species would languish in
bureaucratic limbo awaiting protection. Which is exactly what the Bush
administration wants: the more imperiled species that go extinct the fewer
environmental protections Bush's big-money backers have to comply with."

The Center for Whale
Research, the Whale Museum, the American Cetacean Society, Ocean Advocates,
Orca Conservancy, People for Puget Sound, Friends of the San Juans, the
Cascade Chapter of the Sierra Club, the Washington Toxics Coalition, and
former Washington Secretary of State Ralph Munro were co-signers on the
petition.